Uncover the mystery of the famous address.
IP Address(IPv4) and Firewall: KS005
Do you know? Every time your device needs access to the internet, an IP address is involved, it is very famous in computer networking arena; you cannot work around it. An IP address uniquely identifies a device on a computer network. The concept is similar to an address of a house, so mail from the postal service can be delivered.
When a device requests to read a YouTube video, for example, the server holding this video needs to know where to deliver this package. This is where the IP address comes into play. Unfortunately, because of its technological singularity, bad guys can take advantage of it, making it a target when security lacks. This is why a firewall comes around as one way to supplement the security solution effort one has in place so to mitigate the risk of attacks. To a minimum, there are two IP addresses: The Public (assigned to you by your Internet Service Provider, ISP) and the Private IP address.
The format of an IP address is X.X.X.X. The private IP address, in general, is what we need so that our devices have a minimum of security. It can start with 10.X.X.X, 172.16.X.X or 192.168.X.X. This IP address is assigned to your device by a router, which in general, has firewall capabilities and a public IP address your ISP assigned to it.
To check the IP address on a Windows machine, for example, search for the word "cmd" from the search button on the bottom left corner of the device. The search result will display "Command Prompt." Click on that to open the Microsoft Command-line interface. From there, type in "ipconfig" and hit enter. Now check the IP address. If it starts as I indicated above, your machine has the minimum security; if not, we need to talk and see how we can address that. A bon entendeur, salut!